The collection’s strength is its moments of specificity, and in the rhythmic musicality that emerges as both a theme and a technique. ‘What the Blues Is’ beats with the cantankerous snarling of a dog, the slamming of back doors, silent telephones and the sound of rain on trailer roofs, coalescing in the dolorifuge of the final line: ‘Now play your music.’ In ‘Night Music’, aeroplanes are made extraordinary again, finding surprise in the dynamics of flight: ‘strapped into the miraculous tube / now tens of thousands of feet / above an indifferent ocean’ as the passenger finds a sick bag that reads ‘there’s still a good song left in me.’ The musical theme continues in ‘Angels’ where the final couplet reads, ‘Know us by the way we return to life / watch us remember music.’ However, sometimes the rhymes sound forced (‘the cocaine sheen, the / wonder machine’ in ‘Once Upon a Time in America’) and feel overly improvisational, which work to associate it with the jazz-like rhythms of the beat era, but don’t do much for the poem’s direction.
The lyrical quality of Dawkins’ poetry is brought out by their spoken word history. Dawkins was the 2011 Scottish Poetry Slam champion, and represented the country in the World Cup of Poetry held in Paris that year. Many of the poems feel like spinning yarns, from the spiralling narrative of ‘First Marriage’ to the soft-spoken apostrophe of ‘Letter to my Unborn Child’. The use of repetition in ‘Leaving Scotland’ gives the reader a sense of walking, a steady rhythm as the scenes wheel by:
when it rains and it always rains, water runs so deep down cobbled streets that locals name these sudden rivers after those who may have been swept away.
Much of the narrative poetry in Slow Walk Home is characterised by pastoral and environmental imagery. From the perfect innocuity of ‘Dandelion Clocks’ (originally written for Tasmanian novelist Minnie Darke’s The Lost Love Song) to ‘How the Sky Stays Above Us’, where Dawkins looks reverently towards humble weeds and towering eucalyptus trees for ‘holding up the sky’, there is a childlike sense of curiosity that imbues these poems with fleeting wonder. Whether furtively snipping lilacs from a neighbour’s garden or gazing up into tree canopies, the natural world is a place of discovery and a record of time. In ‘Dandelion Clocks’ there are
Children counting hours their own way launching fluff parachutes into a future
In ‘Our Lives Among the Flowers of Forgetfulness’, Dawkins references the longstanding, peopled history of lutruwita (Tasmania), where colonialism is wrought into the earth itself: ‘we […] acknowledge black lines and rape, iron rings in rock’, a moment of truth that flickers beside a vivid depiction of the Aurora Borealis: ‘crystal nights pulsing / magnetic green’. Here Dawkins alludes to the 2200 settlers, police and military deployed against the Paredarerme, Lairmairrener, Tommeginne and Plangermaireener peoples of the Tasmanian Aboriginal first nations in 1830, less than two hundred years ago. The black line is one aspect of the colonial project that dispossessed thousands of Aboriginal people, and refers to the practice of settlers imprisoning and enslaving Aboriginal women on remote islands such as the Furneaux Archipelago. These histories continue to be elided by the attrition of colonial amnesia, the ‘forgetfulness’ as a rush to innocence symbolised by the title’s flowers. The fleeting surfaces in this poem rush against a sense of deep time and inaccessible space, with the mention of Antarctica (‘the final ice’) and Patagonia in South America, both places that are thought to have split geologically from Tasmania less than 50 million years ago and which continue to share the traces of plant organisms with beginnings in Gondwana.
Slow Walk Home is an expansive collection, with stories that cross continents and generations in a contemplative, musical voice that glows with humour and warmth. Treading a fine line between universality and specificity, its best poems are united by their rhythmic pulse, crystalline imagery and emotion that is carefully distilled but deeply felt.
